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Over two days and two events last week I was given insight into future-thinking, digital integration in the arts and how new technologies will impact our lives.

On the first day I was commissioned to photograph a conference about Digital Innovation in the Arts. As a photographer you are concentrated on getting the best possible images of speakers and the environment, but you can collect nuggets of information here and there. BBC-led afternoon sessions on VR were genuinely fascinating, and enjoyable to photograph. While this tech might still be a considerable time away from mass market penetration, on a visceral level it remains really cool.

They don’t get more distinguished than Mr Simpson. For many people alive today Simpson is one of those omnipresent BBC voices of sturdy broadcasting authority. He has been on our screens and in our airwaves seemingly forever. His 50 year BBC career has seen him reporting from an unfathomable range of dangerous and volatile places, at times of major historical significance.

A Composed Communication blog on automation technology and the new Amazon Echo device.

Voice recognition is a key part of automation technologies which many knowledgeable tech-heads believe will drive human progress through the next part of this century. It’s said that automation is the big step to intelligently streamlining how we lead our lives.

What is Edtech?

Without doing any googling, it seems widely inclusive and rather vague, somewhat elastic. Couldn’t you argue that ALL technology is educational?

Is it about the organisational nuts and bolts of schools, colleges and universities? Is it about how the education itself is delivered? Say you have an organisational solution which isn’t being applied in an educational environment currently, but could be. Hey presto, a little wiggling and that can suddenly become Edtech?

How buying the new Radiohead album briefly changed my music listening experience.

I hate list questions. You know: ‘name your top five films, top ten books’ or whatever. But if you pointed a gun to my head and forced to name a favourite band, I’d have to say Radiohead. (You might then decide to pull the trigger. Your call).

On the eve of International Women’s Day 2016, a talk was given by MacMillan Cancer Support chief executive Lynda Thomas at the Principality Stadium for Cardiff Business Club.

A few days before I’d seen the talk advertised online. My wife is the PR Manager for a charity, so I thought she’d be interested and it would make a cheap evening out.

Lynda Thomas is originally from these parts of South Wales, and she proudly wears her Welshness. It was astute to express this at Cardiff Business Club right from the start, especially during the week of an England-Wales rugby match. Inside the iconic, recently renamed stadium, the crowd was with her immediately.

As now seems to be an annual ritual, last week I headed over to the School of Engineering at Cardiff University for the annual BCS / IET Turing Lecture. This year was the turn of Robert Schukai MBE, Head of Applied Innovation at Thomson Reuters.

The 2016 Turing Lecture was entitled “The Internet of Me: It’s All About My Screens.” It promised a look at how smartphones have revolutionised life, and the information challenge of constantly processing so much data.

Recently I’ve seen a headline or two suggesting Twitter is dying. Those pieces might suggest that it’s for the following reasons. I haven’t clicked many links to find out, but thought I’d add some thoughts here in the hope that there is a groundswell of consensus around the issue.

Apparently over in the US Twitter is really struggling. It failed to add any new users for the second quarter in a row. At the end of September, Twitter had a core audience of 307 million active users, adding just 3 million worldwide during the three months since June. Mass market appeal it seems is no longer there.

Conferences are all about ideas. They are about sharing experience, interpretations of experiences and new understanding. They’re about exchanges and transfers, inspiration and encouragement, networking and collaboration.

Conferences are about a whole bunch of things which are apparently hard to neatly summarise.